KANZI THE CHIMP

KANZI THE CHIMP; A LIFE IN SCIENCE

By ERIK ECKHOLM

Published: June 25, 1985

THE 4-year-old pygmy chimpanzee named Kanzi has entered an exasperating ''contrary'' phase. If his human companion suggests walking to the treehouse, he will invariably insist, punching symbols on a keyboard, on going somewhere else.

Kanzi, who researchers say has shown the most advanced linguistic abilities ever documented in an animal, gets jealous when people shift their attention to Mulika, his infant half-sister. He is not above giving her a sharp pinch.

Tending a precocious ape, it becomes clear in the course of a typical day at the Language Research Center near Atlanta, requires the limitless patience of a model parent.

Like children, the young apes demand constant attention. As he roams the center's 55-acre property, Kanzi again and again asks his teachers to play energetic games of tag and hide-and-seek, ''talking'' with them on a keyboard filled with geometric symbols that stand for words. He drags his companions to all corners of the forested estate, over hills and through a mosquito-infested swamp.

''In his motor skills and his interest in competitive games, he's like a 7- or 8-year-old boy,'' said E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the research leader. ''He'd like to have boys around to play tackle football.''

Throughout the long days of roving and play, of purposeful journeys and aimless puttering, the teachers try to remain cheerful and alert. They note every act of symbolic communication for the scientific record. The animals' frequent requests to be groomed or hugged, a visitor soon senses, help stoke the spirits of the researchers as much as they reassure the apes.

As an infant, Kanzi played in the laboratory while scientists taught symbols to his mother, Matata, a wild-born animal regarded as past the prime age for learning language. The researchers already suspected that pygmy chimpanzees were more intelligent than common chimpanzees, a different species they had worked with for years. But baby Kanzi's strongest indications of interest in the symbols, the teachers thought, were the many times he took ''great joy in interrupting his mother's training sessions by slapping haphazardly at the keys.''

When Kanzi was two and a half, his mother was taken away for breeding, and he suddenly revealed, to the scientists' amazement, that he had been learning symbols out of the corner of his eye. He hit the sign for apple, then proved he knew what he was saying by picking an apple from an assortment of foods. He punched the symbol for ''ball'' and pointed to a ball.

In the world of ape linguistics, these were brilliant feats. Common chimpanzees had mastered symbols only after long and arduous training.

The scientists scrapped their existing research plan. Instead of building vocabulary through structured training sessions with food rewards, they decided to see if Kanzi could learn language the way a child does. As they later described it, ''the focus of the research would be upon what, if anything, Kanzi would learn by observing the way in which others used the symbols around him.'' But helping a young pygmy chimpanzee make scientific history is no simple task.

The challenge was to provide Kanzi, and more recently Mulika too, with a milieu that would encourage spontaneity but also stimulate linguistic skills that do not appear naturally. Equally important, the routine would have to yield precise documentation of the apes' achievements if they were to be accepted by a skeptical scientific community.

To meet these varied goals, the Atlanta scientists have tried to create a world that is half human, half more natural for an ape. Kanzi has great freedom to roam the grounds of the institute, which is jointly administered by Georgia State University and the Yerkes primate center of Emory University. Locations throughout the estate such as the treehouse, the trailer and the ''mushroom path'' have all been assigned symbols. Anatomically unable, like all apes, to pronounce words, Kanzi uses the keyboard to say where he wants to go, what he wants to eat and what games he wants to play.

Two people accompany Kanzi and Mulika constantly from morning to night. Apart from Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh, six other teachers, graduate students who alternate half-day shifts, provide the young animals with a stable extended family.

Computers ease the task of data collection. On the indoor keyboard, every punch of a symbol is instantly recorded and, in a new feature, is followed by an oral rendition of the word by a computer-synthesized voice. To further encourage the apes' comprehension of spoken English, the researchers constantly talk about what they are doing.

Outdoors, one person carries a keyboard while another records all of Kanzi's symbolic statements in a notebook for later entry into computers. A portable keyboard with a self-contained computer and voice-synthesizer is under development.

Around 7:30 A.M., soon after the animals awake and while they are still a bit sluggish, they are treated to television. In an ape's version of Sesame Street, some tapes show objects together with their symbols; evidence indicates Kanzi has picked up new words through this medium.

Sometimes a giant bunny appears on the screen, talking about novel things while symbols appear in the corner. On a few occasions this intriguing, if slightly fearsome, creature has even made surprise appearances in the woods. To avoid exciting an eavesdropping Kanzi, the researchers tell a visitor about the bunny by spelling rather than pronouncing the word. They believe the bunny adds wonder to the apes' lives, much as Santa Claus does for a child, and hope Kanzi will not discover it is really a teacher in costume.

Ready for Adventure

By 9 o'clock, the young apes are bounding around outside the laboratory. Kanzi initiates a game of tag with his companions, and then a game he calls ''grab-chase.'' After that, he tells one teacher, Rose Sevcik, to hide while the rest seek her. Later he asks one teacher to chase the other while he watches from a branch.

Now hungry and ready for adventure, Kanzi punches ''banana'' and leads the group along the path to the treehouse where he knows a banana awaits. His food is dispersed daily thoughout the forest, with the same foods always in the same locations, just as specific fruit trees would be found in the same spots in the wild.

On the way to his next destination, Kanzi punches the newly learned symbol for ''explore.'' He leaves the trail so he can climb trees, tug at vines and rummage through the brush, where he gathers tasty berries and bugs to eat.

The researchers sometimes fret about Kanzi's safety. ''I worry about all kinds of things,'' Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh admits. ''He might eat something poisonous in the woods, or get bitten by a snake. I worry when he catches a cold. We're taking a risk raising him in this free environment, but we feel the more his life is like in the wild, the better.''

By early afternoon, the exploration and games have taken their toll, and the two young apes are ready for a short nap. Mulika curls up in a teacher's lap in the woods.

Later, Kanzi says he wants to visit the site where he knows, since he read it earlier on a signpost, a food ''surprise'' awaits. There he will spend an hour taking tests.

One teacher holds up three pictures without knowing their order. The second teacher punches ''water'' and Kanzi correctly picks out the picture of a running faucet. Similar tests are repeated, with Kanzi sometimes matching a picture to a symbol and sometimes the reverse.

Late in the afternoon, his teachers want to enter the laboratory but Kanzi is sitting obstinately on top of a cage, ignoring their pleas. The teachers - concerned lest Kanzi become too spoiled - use their surefire method of gaining cooperation: They threaten to go inside anyway. Kanzi, who hates to be alone, quickly climbs down and follows.

A Little Television Before Bed

The infant Mulika, for her part, has begun imitating the keyboard use of her brother and human companions. Not quite old enough to learn the language, she is passing through a stage of calling everything by the symbol for ''milk,'' a parallel to a human infant's cry of ''dah,'' or the like, to label everything and everyone.

By 7 P.M., as the Georgia sunlight softens, Kanzi and Mulika are tiring and they join their mother in the sleeping room. ''Once Kanzi has gotten into bed, he prefers not to get up,'' Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh said, and he uses the keyboard to ask for items he is unwilling to fetch himself. ''He often asks for more blankets, which he uses to build a large sleeping nest, and for his ball, which he likes to sleep with.'' Kanzi, who shares a bed with his sister, often also types a request for ice to chew on, or for ice water or ice Coke. And most evenings, he asks to watch television.

The animals see Jane Goodall studying chimpanzees in Africa, one of Kanzi's favorite shows. Watching the screen, his mother, who was born in Zaire and is thought to have memories of wild apes, gets excited and emits loud shrieks.

Kanzi's other video favorites are boxing and wrestling matches, a movie pairing Clint Eastwood with a trained orangutan and the movie ''Quest for Fire,'' which depicts ancient primates discovering how to use fire. Displaying his unusual reasoning skills, Kanzi figured out he could request that film by punching the symbols for ''campfire'' and ''TV.''

By 7:45, nestled in bed with a teacher, Kelly McDonald, Kanzi and Mulika drop off to sleep. Miss McDonald slips off the bed and out of the room, finished with another day of easy play and hard science.